The present discussion is directed toward machine translation systems for translating text from one language to another. More particularly, the present discussion is directed toward the evaluation of machine translation systems.
Machine translation systems are used to automatically translate text from one language to another. Machine translation systems provide a fast and cost effective way to translate large amounts of text that would otherwise require labor intensive work by human translators. The use of machine translations can greatly simplify translation tasks and effective machine translation systems provide great utility for those who have translation requirements.
Because of the sometimes large differences between two different languages, machine translation systems may be faced with a number of different issues to provide a quality translation between one language and another. For example, different human languages not only have different individual words to express a particular thought, but may also include a number of different types of linguistic phenomena that make automated translation a challenging task. An example of such a linguistic phenomena is the ambiguity of definition that certain words have. That is, a given word in one language can have a plurality of meanings. Thus, to perform a proper translation from a source language to a target language, a machine translation system must not only recognize the word in the source language, but understand its meaning by, for example, the context in which the word is being used. There are many other types of linguistic phenomena, including, for example, the organization of sentences, the use of idioms, and so forth.
Machine translation systems can be evaluated by providing text to be translated and manually determining the quality of the translation. Manually evaluating candidate translation systems, however, can be labor intensive and costly. Therefore, automated machine translation evaluation systems have been created to evaluate the performance of candidate machine translation systems so that such translation systems can be improved. Automated evaluation systems can provide information related to the performance of machine translation systems without the time and costs association with a manual evaluation system. As with the machine translation systems themselves, automated evaluation systems can be improved to provide more effective evaluations.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.